There is nothing more satisfying than sharing that once in a lifetime shot with the world, except maybe seeing that it has been viewed by a few thousand people. These kinds of stats have been collected by Flickr for quite some time, and now they are available to developers thanks to some new functions added to the Flickr API:

Today we also announce the availability of an API to access your stats data. It gives you access to all the referrer and view count data for the last 28 days. We're looking forward to developers building apps to keep track of their stats over the long term, we hope that this will enable more creative uses of stats data than we are able to support.

Over a dozen new functions have been added providing, among other things, details on the number of times a photo has been viewed, the referring domain and web page, and a list of the most popular photos on any given day.

These new functions allow developers to access stats dating back to 2006, although not all users have stats enabled:

The stats feature is only available to pro account holders. If you are a free account holder and you choose to upgrade, we'll have 28 days worth of stats there waiting for you.

A recent code.flickr blog post discusses several of the new stats functions, and should give developers pointers on how to use this new functionality.

About the author:Matthew Casperson
Matthew is a freelance writer, focusing on web and multimedia technologies. His work can be found featured on Programmable Web, Brighthub, Hubfolio, Chrome Experiments, Informit, Flash Tuts Plus and The Tech Labs.

Comments(1)

If you're interested in FLickr Stats, take a look to our app, based on Flickr Api, it backups your stats to keep them available during more than 28 days, and give a lot more stats than flickr originaly gives, such as groups bringing visits, activity details by period, and interactions with your contacts.
The idea is to be a kind of "Google analytics" for Flickr pro users.